


like daylight

by lagaudiere



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24246664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lagaudiere/pseuds/lagaudiere
Summary: She scowls at you, unimpressed. She can always tell when you’re hiding something, no matter how trivial it is, and this isn’t trivial stuff.“You’re supposed to tell me if you have secrets,” she says petulantly. “You’re my best friend.”She is, and it’s a deadly serious thing to be someone’s best friend. She wrote in your diary herself, when you were younger, because she said best friends should be able to read each other’s diaries; she wrote both of your names in block letters on the first page. There wasn’t anything interesting in your diary, just a recounting of the mundane things you did every day, and when she showed you hers it was only about characters on the soap operas she watched with her mom. It still felt good to have a secret.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 18
Kudos: 82
Collections: Quarantine It Fic Fest





	like daylight

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the quarantine IT fic fest! I went with the prompt for lesbian Reddie fic because it was broad enough for me to do whatever I wanted, which was apparently rewrite the whole movie, again. 
> 
> This is written in the second person because it was less awkward than using their names or trying to come up with different ones. I hope that isn't a dealbreaker for the person who requested this, but if it is, you know, understandable. 
> 
> Warnings for this: this is following the plot of the movie pretty closely, though it doesn't include the final Major Character Death. The themes of homophobia and misogyny are more implied here than explicitly stated, and definitely less explicit than in canon, but they are definitely there. I also borrowed King's werewolf metaphor from the book. There are no slurs, scenes of explicit violence, etc. However, please exercise caution and if any part of this premise sounds like something you'd rather not read, feel free to give this one a pass. I totally get it. 
> 
> Title from Taylor Swift's "Daylight," because it is cool and fun to be a cliche.

_1984_

It’s raining at recess on the day you first talk to the girl who will be your best friend.

You’re eight years old and all of your friends are boys. Not that you have a wide selection of friends, but you’ve got Stan and Bill and that’s all that really matters. They don’t mind you wanting to be Spider-Man when you act out scenes from comics out at the barrens and they’re good guys, Stan and Bill, even if people do smile too much when they see you with one of them and ask if they’re your “little boyfriends.” 

You don’t get along all that well with the girls in your class — you’ve tried making friends the best way you know how, by talking about whatever you’re interested in and waiting for the other person to join in, but it doesn’t ever seem to work. Girls get disgusted if you showed them a cool bug you’ve found and they all read boring books about babysitting and you think sometimes that maybe you should’ve been a boy. 

Your mom told you that she always wanted a girl. She’d say it when she was despairing over the daughter she actually had, pulling your hair too tight into pigtails or trying to tempt you into trying on a dress, which you always resist. She says it like she’s telling a joke, but maybe it’s only funny to her. 

This girl, you’ve seen her around but you’ve never been in the same class before this year. She’s the shortest girl in your class — tiny, _cute as a button_ , you think, like your mom cooing over someone’s baby at church. 

She’s sitting by herself at recess, on the swings, but she’s not swinging. She’s staring down at her feet, looking miserable, like she’s trying not to cry. 

It’s probably not a good idea to go over — she might get really mad at you, or worse, start crying — but you do it anyway. “Hi,” you say, sitting down in the swing next to her, “what are you so upset about?” 

She glares at you. She looks angry, passionately angry in a way that’s a little unnerving. You think you’ve only seen adults look that mad before. “I got mud on my socks,” she says. 

You look down at her feet. You’re wearing sneakers, but she’s got these black buckled shoes on, covered with mud, and the socks are white lace. They’re less muddy than the shoes, but still pretty bad. There’s some on the hem of her dress, too. 

“Well,” you say uselessly, “it rained yesterday.” 

“Oh, thanks!” she says viciously. “I know that it rained, stupid.” 

She says the word in a way that’s deeply cutting, but you venture on with a response anyway. “Are you sad because your socks are ruined?” 

She gives you another look like you’re a complete idiot. “I don’t care,” she says. “My mom’s going to be mad, though. She says I’m supposed to take better care of my things. And if you get your feet wet you can get really sick.” 

You’re not sure if that’s true, but she says it with a lot of authority, so much you’re not really sure how to respond, and you lapse into uneasy silence for a while. 

“I’m sorry about your socks,” you say after a long moment of silence. “But the thing is, it’s kind of too late to do anything about it, so I really don’t think you should spend all of recess being upset about it.” After recess is silent reading time, which is the worst part of the school day, 

“I’m not going to have any fun anymore,” she says with determination. “I’m too upset.” She’s starting to look a little less angry, though, you think. Her arms aren’t crossed across her chest anymore. 

“How’d you get your socks muddy, anyway?” you ask. Most of the playground is covered in wood chips. 

“I saw a dead bird,” she says after a moment. 

“What?” You decide that you’re going to have to totally reevaluate your impression of this girl. “You were looking at a dead frog?” 

“It’s not _weird_ ,” she says defensively. “I just saw it, and it bothered me that it was just dead and sitting in the grass where nobody cared about it. _Insects_ could eat it,” she says, her voice low and disgusted. “I just thought maybe I should bury it.” 

“Right,” you say, “a proper bird funeral.” You’re trying to do the British accent you’ve been working on, because “proper” is a British word, but she just glares at you.

“Are you making fun of me?” 

“No!” you say quickly. “In fact, I could totally help you bury it, if you wanted to. I don’t care about getting my socks wet. And if my mom does, she’s used to it by now.” 

She looks at you for a long moment, evaluating, and you find that you suddenly want to get her approval. You want to be her friend, you think. It seems like she could use one, anyway. “My friend Stan’s a bird expert, too,” you add. “He could probably tell us what kind of bird it is and how long it’s been dead and everything.” 

She considers it for a moment longer, and then she nods. “Yeah,” she says, “I guess that would be okay.” 

_1989_

For as long as you remember it, and then again after your memories come back, you’ll remember the summer of 1989 as the best and worst months of your life. There was a balance, a rightness, to the seven of you that summer, but it’s also the summer something got its claws into you and never let go. 

There’s never really been a time when you didn’t know, about yourself. Maybe someone else could keep that a secret from herself, but not you, always too aware of your own body and of your own mind going a hundred miles a minute. Maybe that’s why you’ve dreaded every harbinger of puberty, of growing up, as much as have. Your mom’s talks about sanitary pads and training bras made you feel mortified, horrified with yourself and your own body, even though she kept telling you it was just what every girl went through. It wasn’t the same for every girl, though, you weren’t going to grow up the same way as Greta Keene and the other girls at school who gossiped over fashion magazines in between classes and scrawled the names of girls they didn’t like on bathroom walls. 

The dynamics of your friendships are shifting strangely, that summer; Bill and Stan, who have been your friends since grade school, seem to have suddenly noticed that Beverly is a girl in a way they never did with either of you. It’s strange, to be in the presence of it. Sometimes you open your mouth to tease Bill about having a crush and it dies on your tongue; you’re not supposed to tease him like that. You think about Bill kissing Beverly in the third grade, and you wonder if it’s ever occurred to him to kiss you, and the thought makes your stomach twist in a way you don’t think it should. 

You feel a little strange around Beverly, immature, like she’s already crossed over into some stage you haven’t accessed and you’re not sure you ever will. She makes you feel too tall and too skinny, like you’re talking up too much space but also like a little kid, one you might think was a boy or a girl depending on the hat they were wearing. You feel a little strange all the time, really, in a way you don’t want to have a name for. 

It’s when you see the werewolf that you know the strangeness isn’t entirely inside of you. 

Later, you’ll tell everyone what happened with Bowers was just because he couldn’t handle losing to a girl at Street Fighter — the guys at the arcade never have liked you hanging around, really — but that’s not all that it was. You taught this girl how to play, she wasn’t bad after the first few rounds, and you asked her if she wanted to go again, and that’s when Bowers showed up. He was supposed to be looking out for his cousin, he said, and he didn’t want to leave her alone, not with you, not with — 

Well. You don’t want to think about what he said. 

You run, as soon as you’re out the door and your feet hit the sidewalk again, run until you’re sure that no one’s following up, and you collapse onto a park hence when you’re sure you’re alone. And then you hear the rustling in the bushes nearby and you open your eyes to see it, the flash of sharp snarling teeth. The blood dripping from the fangs. 

You saw this movie at Bill’s, a horror movie that was a few years old and that your parents never would have let you watch at home — neither would Bill’s, before Georgie died. It was called _The Howling_ , and most horror movies didn’t scare you, but there was something about that one that stuck in your mind. In the climactic scene this woman, Karen, transform into a werewolf on live TV, and the people watching at home are laughing at her, not believing that it’s real, but it _is_ , and that scene stuck in your head for some reason, the shape of her face warping and changing. 

When you see the werewolf, its eyes are wide and bloodshot and it opens its mouth, chomps its teeth as if it’s going to bite, but that isn’t the part that really scares you. The part that scares you is that you recognize the fabric of the shirt she’s wearing, torn and bloodstained, as your own. 

“It’s not real,” you tell yourself, your voice sounding weak and strange, “it’s not real,” but you know, you know that it is. 

You’re running again, and it’s behind you, keeping pace, almost like it’s not even trying to catch you but just to make you afraid that it’s right behind you, and your breath is ragged and harsh and you hear a taunting singsong voice behind you — _“I know your secret”_ — but you don’t turn to look and eventually it fades away. 

When the others bring up the things that they’ve seen — the clown, they keep saying, but and wasn’t a clown, not for you, but you know it’s the same thing — you deny it. You shake your head, pretend you haven’t seen a thing. You’re not sure why. Maybe it’s because you’re worried that would know what it meant, even if you don’t precisely know yourself. 

She comes looking for you afterwards, when everyone’s scattered with a feeling of anxiety still hanging in the air. 

“You’re really not going to tell me what you say?” she says. 

“I told you that I _didn’t_ see _anything_ ,” you reply. “Not my fault that all of you are hallucinating. It must be something in the water supply.” 

She scowls at you, unimpressed. She can always tell when you’re hiding something, no matter how trivial it is, and this isn’t trivial stuff. 

“You’re supposed to tell me if you have secrets,” she says petulantly. “You’re my _best friend_.” 

She is, and it’s a deadly serious thing to be someone’s best friend. She wrote in your diary herself, when you were younger, because she said best friends should be able to read each other’s diaries; she wrote both of your names in block letters on the first page. There wasn’t anything interesting in your diary, just a recounting of the mundane things you did every day, and when she showed you hers it was only about characters on the soap operas she watched with her mom. It still felt good to have a secret. 

“What did you see?” you ask her. Her face falls, suddenly; you can hear her breath catch. 

“It was like—“ She winces; you can tell that she’s suppressing a shudder. “It was, just a woman, I I guess, but she was sick, she was wasting away.” She pulls nervously on a loose thread in the hem of her shirt. “She has these sores on her skin, and I guess I just knew that she was — sick. And she was starving. Both at once.” 

It sounds familiar and yet strange, not precisely what you saw — and that scares you, because it means it’s something custom-made just for you, something inside yourself manifested into almost reality. 

“It was a werewolf,” you tell her. “It was like — from this movie I saw at Bill’s. I don’t know, I guess it scared me more than I thought it did.” 

She doesn’t press anymore than that. She puts a hand on your knee though, for a little bit, a gesture of comfort, and you find that it actually does help. It calms you down, makes you think maybe everything will be okay. You’re grateful for her, for the covenant of best friendship that doesn’t seem to have a crack in it. But, you think, curling your fingers around hers, you don’t know if it’ll stay that way. 

Things are never the same again after that summer, after she breaks her arm and writes that vivid red “V” across it, after you stand in a circle making a blood oath with Stan’s Boy Scout knife. Everything feels tentative and brittle after that, like your lives could splinter and crack at any moment, even if after a while you can’t quite remember why. 

_1992_

She asks you to cut her hair, the summer when you’re sixteen. You’re not sure why she asks you, specifically, except that maybe she doesn’t have a lot of other options. Stan shaved his head on an impulse last year and made his mother cry, but Stan’s family moved out to Vermont months ago. 

You keep your own hair cut short, but you don’t do it yourself. You had to go a few rounds with your parents over it, over your _beautiful curls_ , but they relented like they do about most things. 

“I just want it to be short for the summer,” she tells you over lunch at school. It’s only the two of you in the same lunch period this year and there are never enough seats and it’s not like there’s anyone else you want to sit with anyway, so you always eat in the stairwell between the cafeteria and the science wing where no one bothers you. She’s already stealing your Goldfish crackers. 

“You see some new spread in a fashion magazine?” you ask, because you’ve caught her reading them sometimes. 

She scowls, offended. “ _No_. I don’t care what it looks like,” she says haughtily. “It just gets in my face whenever I’m running. Even if it’s in a ponytail.” 

She’s a track star now, in spite of her mother’s objections to participation in organized sports. Track was the compromise; softball, Mrs. Kaspbrak said, was too dangerous. 

She’s beautiful when she’s running, her hair in a ponytail streaming out behind her. If there were cheerleaders for the girls’ track team, you think maybe you’d join the squad, wave those stupid pom-poms around to cheer her on. 

“I’ll do my best,” you say dubiously. “But it’s not like I went to beauty school, you know. It’s not gonna look like Bev’s did when she chopped it all off.” 

She rolls her eyes. “I told you I don’t care. If your dad has an electric razor or something you can just use that.” 

So she comes over after school one day while your parents are both out, and you fiddle with your dad’s electric razor, a little paranoid that you’re going to cut out a chunk of her ear. You shave off a patch of overgrown hair on the back of your ankle and it goes okay, but you’re still nervous, thinking about holding something sharp up close to her skin. Last winter she fell off her bike and cut herself on some discarded glass bottle, and you were completely useless while she disinfected her own cut. 

She’s already decided the best way to do this, and you sit together in the empty bathtub in your parents’ bathroom, with your knees tucked under you while she sits cross-legged in front of you. “Come on,” she says while you weigh her ponytail in one hand, hesitating with the scissors in the other. 

“Alright, alright,” you say. You snap the scissors a couple of times and then cut through her ponytail as close to the elastic hair tie as you can manage. It’s one clean snip and then you’re holding a fistful of her hair, the hair tie springing free. 

For a moment you feel pretty sad about, holding her severed hair in your hand. It’s perfect hair, really, dark brown and shiny and slightly wavy not in the way yours is, always tangled and sticking up in the back, but shampoo-commercial sleek. 

It’s a shame to throw it away, really, and you make a joke about it, “Any secret paramours you wanna give this away to?” and she says, “Gross” and you reluctantly toss it into the bathroom wastebasket you set next to the bathtub. 

She shakes out what’s left of her hair. “Better already.” 

“Um, okay,” you say, checking the settings on the razor. “How short do you want it?” 

“Pretty short, I think.” She’s confident about it. “I want to be aerodynamic,” she says, giggling. 

“Alright,” you say again. “You’ll be the fastest thing on two legs, Kaspbrak.” 

You still feel a chill of fear when you shear away the first section of her hair, but of course there’s no blood. It falls away easily; it’s perfectly all right. 

You don’t talk while you do it. You don’t stop talking very often, you know that truth about yourself, but you want to concentrate while you’re doing this. She doesn’t say anything either; you imagine that her eyes are closed, like you’d close your eyes at the salon, and when you readjust the angle of her head so you can reach the spots behind her ears she doesn’t resist. You’re careful with it, with the gentle curve of her head under your hands, you’re so aware of how easy it would be to hurt her. But you don’t, you wouldn’t, you think with a kind of thrill, and she trusts you. 

“Okay,” you say when it’s finished, when you’ve run your hands all over her head making sure it’s even and there aren’t any spots you missed. Her hair is prickly, now, underneath your fingers. “You should rinse it off now, I guess.” 

“Oh, right,” she says distractedly. You uncurl awkwardly and step out of the bathtub after brushing off the stray hairs all over your hands as best as you can. It’s probably going to get everywhere no matter what you do. You avert your eyes while she sticks her head under the shower spray. 

When she steps out of the tub you hand her a towel and she tousles her wet, newly short hair with it before looking at it in the mirror, her eyes going wide as she sees for the first time how different it looks. 

For a moment you feel a sense of dread rising in your throat, looking at the finished product in the mirror. The girls at school aren’t going to like it, aren’t going to let her walk down the hallway without saying something about it, and her mom will be furious. She’ll be grounded for a month, probably, or at least her mom will say she’s grounded and she’ll have to figure out a way to weasel out of it, which she always does. 

For a moment you think about saying something, apologizing, telling her this was a stupid mistake and you never should have let her talk you into it. _Everybody’s going to think you’re a lesbian_ , you almost say, and she has to know that, right? She can’t not know that. 

“What d’ya think, Charlie Brown?” you say instead, and she smiles. She runs a hand over the short bristles of her hair, still looking at herself in the mirror, 

She’s so happy that you can see it through her own eyes, and you realize she looks more beautiful than ever, her fierce self-determination as visible as it’s ever been. You think to yourself that loving her isn’t going to get any smaller as you get older, as you sort of hoped it might. It’s probably just going to keep getting bigger. 

“It’s perfect,” she says, and she’s right. 

_1995_

The first girl you remember falling in love with is your freshman year college roommate, a girl named Heather who wears chokers and thick, dark eyeliner. She’s always asking you to let her do your makeup and you’re always saying no, although you do most of the other things she wants you to do: tag along to crowded, smoky party, listen to her Morrisey albums and watch French movies, spend the half the night in the library when she brings home a boy. You have no expectation that Heather would ever be interested in you, but you honestly don’t mind. It’s good just to have a friend; you didn’t have many in high school, or really before that, as far as you remember. 

It’s really not that hard for you to fall in love. You worry that you might have done it with anyone you happened to share a room with for an entire semester. It’s surprisingly easy to fall out of love, too, when you go back to your parents’ place in Connecticut for the summer and don’t see her for months, and you wonder if maybe it wasn’t about Heather at all, but about something you wanted and couldn’t find, something that had gone missing. 

Sandy is the second girl you remember loving, sophomore year, and you will for the rest of your college career, even after she says she doesn’t think the two of you should see each other anymore, right until you drop out one semester shy of graduation and move to Los Angeles. It’ll take longer to shake that one off, even in a new city, but you’ll do it eventually, and again the thing you miss won’t be her, precisely. It’ll still be the missing piece where you tried to fit her in. 

You meet her at an event thrown by the college Feminist Society, which you wandered into because you didn’t really know how else to meet girls. You make a joke when she introduces herself, some dumb crack about how you’re just there because you’re looking for an excuse to stop shaving your legs. She takes it too seriously and starts lecturing you, a little bit, about double standards and harmful beauty culture, and you like that about her, that she’s slightly too serious.

By the end of the night you’re asking her, “Wanna come back to my dorm and smoke a joint?” and she’s looking at you slightly suspiciously before her shoulders relax and she says, “Yeah, alright,” and it’s not too long after that that you’re kissing her, hesitantly at first and then desperately like you’ve waited years to do it, and your hands are sliding under her shirt and it’s okay, she doesn’t shove you away or freeze up, it’s okay. 

It feels slightly wrong, slightly off, but in your head you think of her as your first love, eliding over Heather, deciding that something that short-lived and unrequited doesn’t count. It’s different with Sandy. The two of you are inseparable for a long while. You spend all your time together when you’re not in class and you walk across campus arm-in-arm because you can get away with that. All of her friends hate you. 

You don’t ever tell her you love her out loud. 

You’re lying half-tangled together in your dorm room bed and Sandy’s talking about the Oklahoma City bombing. “It’s scary,” she says, “it’s just scary, to live in the same country as people like that. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about it.” 

Sandy takes this kind of thing hard, almost like she feels responsible for it. It’s not that it doesn’t make you feel anything — of course it does, the news playing on the TV in the common room made you sad and a little sick — but it doesn’t surprise you. You can’t remember ever being truly shocked by violence, the way people expect you to be. 

Sandy, who wants to be a lawyer, says you’re a cynic, and you don’t say it but you think she’s naive. 

“You can’t do anything about it,” you say. “It’s just like, the way things are. People have been killing each other forever, they’re going to keep killing each other.” 

“I hate it when you talk like that,” she says. You know she does. 

“It’s just the truth. This whole country is like, rotten. Everyone hates everyone. Most people’s main thing is hate, politically.” 

Sandy’s rolling her eyes at you, sitting up like she’s agitated but not getting up to walk away. You tug halfheartedly on the hem of her shirt. “You know,” she says, “when you say that stuff I don’t take you seriously, but I don’t even think _you_ take you seriously. I don’t think if you really believed all that you would want to spend your whole life telling jokes. Trying to make people laugh.” 

That’s selfish, though, you think. You don’t do that for anybody else. You like being the center of attention and you like being listened to more than you’re looked at, though you’re not sure if you’ve pulled that off yet. 

“That’s what I’m good at, babe,” you say flippantly. “That and a couple other things.” You wriggle your eyebrows at her suggestively, and her frown turns up at the corners into a smile and then, eventually, a laugh. That’s a win for you. It always is. 

When Sandy calls you up years later, years after the fight and the breakup you didn’t call a breakup and your moving to LA, she tells you she saw you on TV. She doesn’t mention that you’ve rewritten your whole life story, carefully editing her out of it. She doesn’t say a word about the fabricated anecdotes from your college years that she would immediately have recognized as fakes. She tells you that she’s proud of you, and about her partner and their baby and their nice place in NYC, and it’s exactly what you could have predicted all along. 

_2001_

You’re standing outside Second City after your show, sucking down the cigarette you always want desperately after a performance. It helps settle the nerves. You don’t get nervous before you perform, really; after a few years, there’s not much stage fright. You just get up on stage and do something stupid, something impulsive, which comes naturally. It’s afterwards that you start to worry. No matter how much the audience laughs there’s a part of you that thinks it must be insincere, must be laughter at you rather than laughter with you. Maybe in a few years you’ll shake that too. 

Nicole slides up next to you, her shoulder knocking against yours. “Hey,” she says, “didn’t anyone ever tell ya those things are bad for you?” 

You grin at her, smudging the cigarette out on the brick wall behind you. “Tell you the truth, I only remember the fun parts from middle school health class.” You’re smirking, putting on a bit of a show in the way you artfully slouch against the wall. 

You can never tell, with girls like Nicole, if it’s flirting. It’s embarrassing — you make excuses to touch her when you’re in scenes together, conscious of it but somehow unable to stop yourself. Earlier tonight you cast yourself as the police officer to her bank robber and you wrapped your arms around her waist and lifted her off the ground, her feet kicking against you as she struggled to escape. Just a game, but you’re replaying it in your mind now, as she leans into you. There’s something about how much shorter she is than you, how much smaller, that you don’t want to examine too much. It makes your palms sweat, and you push your glasses up your nose with a nervous smile. 

“You can’t tell anyone this,” she says, and your heart does a hopeful skip in your chest for a moment, “but I’m kind of having a thing with Jared.” 

Your heart sinks in disappointment, but it’s honestly not a surprise. It’s more resignation than anything. You’re getting used to it, to wanting the people you can’t have. 

“Jared? Why the fuck is a secret if you’re banging Jared?” 

“Ugh, it’s just a whole situation, because he broke up with Emily but they’re still living together until the lease expires, and we can’t really go over to my place because my roommate hates him...” 

“I get it,” you say. “Look, no judgment from me, a girl’s gotta get laid.” 

“What about you and Dean, though, huh?” Nicole says, grinning broadly and a little drunkenly. “He’s totally into it.” 

You laugh, lightly. The idea is absurd to you and you almost can’t believe she doesn’t know, that she can’t see it. It’s not like you tell people, but you’re used to them catching on. 

“We’re friends,” you say. “We’re writing a pilot together.” Dean’s funny enough, and you’re friends in the surface-level way you’re friends with a lot of guys, but you’re sure he doesn’t think of you like that. Guys don’t, generally. Mixed blessing. 

“Oh-kay,” Nicole singsongs, like she doesn’t quite believe you, and you laugh. You can’t quite bring yourself to break the illusion, knowing she won’t see you the same way afterward, knowing she might not lean her shoulder against you or want to touch you at all. You light another cigarette. 

_2007_

“Are these all my lines?” you say, flipping through your few meager pages of the script. 

“Uh, yeah, sorry,” Dean says. “A few of Tiffany’s scenes got cut.” 

Your pilot never got out of the ground, but Dean’s career did. This is his second movie, the first one a low-budget and painfully stupid buddy cop thing where one of the cops spoke in an Irish accent so bad you were pretty sure it was technically hate speech. 

“Yeah, dude, it seems like pretty much everything I suggested got cut,” you say. Dean wrote the part for you — Tiffany, the main guy’s ex-girlfriend in the stoner comedy he was making — and you gave him suggestions over the phone, told him you wanted to actually make the character funny instead of an uptight-girlfriend cliche. “Where’s the scene about her allergies? Where she’s talking about WebMD?” 

Dean and the other guys at the table read are eyeing you warily, like you’re doing something embarrassing. Which you’re not, you’re not, you have as much right to advocate for your part in this bullshit movie as anybody else. You should be asking Dean for a fucking co-writer credit. 

“It just didn’t fit,” Dean says. “I’m sorry.” 

“Oh, right, great. The sex scene fit in, though, huh? Plenty of room for that. If you think I’m taking my bra off for this shit you are fucking delusional.” 

Dean laughs. “C’mon, Tozier,” he says, using the last name like it’s all buddy-buddy, like you’re one of the guys. “It’s a funny scene.” 

“Fuck this, man, I thought you cast me in this movie because I was funny,” you snap. “If you wanted somebody to stand there and look pretty I know you could’ve gotten a hotter girl.” 

It’s a joke, you say it like a joke, but a big part of you means it. You told yourself there was no way you were getting parts because someone wanted to sleep with you — not in Hollywood where model-skinny, model-pretty girls were as common as dorky guys with glasses too big for their faces. You told yourself you’d somehow earned a membership as one of the guys by being as tall and as casually dressed and willing to take a joke as any of them, but of course it wasn’t true. You could make as many dick jokes as you wanted and you would still always be the girl making dick jokes, and they would think you were cool until you made them a little too uncomfortable. 

He raises an eyebrow. “Sure,” he says. “But take it as a compliment. We wanted you.” 

You wish you were the type of person to walk out of the table read without another word, to end this with the fuck-you and middle finger he deserves, but you don’t do it. You call your agent the next day and make him quit the movie for you, the classic coward’s way out, and you tell yourself you’re going to start writing your own shit again. This time, you’re really going to do it. 

_2013_

You couldn’t turn down every role like that, though. You did it for a while, got yourself a late-night writing job, stayed out of the spotlight. But there was always that itch under your skin, always that feeling of I-wanna-be-a-star, that childish and girlish desire for the spotlight. So you took more movie roles, even the mediocre ones, got a main-cast role on a sitcom, got a little bit famous. 

Eventually, you told your agent you wanted to go back to standup, and you apparently had enough brownie points built up that he said it would be okay. Your career kind of took off from there, in a way you hadn’t been expecting and that seemed, despite your years in the business, almost unearned. Imposter syndrome, you tell yourself, which your old roommate Brooke used to tell you was something every woman had. 

Your first special got mixed reviews. Some of them said it was a bold, feminist statement proclaiming women could be just as promiscuous and stupid and callous as men. Other people thought it was just crass and disgusting and irredeemably mean-spirited, and that was okay too. Whatever it would take to get people talking about you, to make sure you could have a career 

You read some of the lines out loud to your manager, Sarah, trying out different line deliveries that never sound quite right. 

“I don’t know what this is,” you say. “None of it’s working, it sounds fucking stupid. This was written for a twenty-five-year-old.” 

It’s all that grim relationship humor that’s self-deprecation disguised as poking fun at men: _oh, my boyfriend cheats on me, he’d rather play video games than take me on a date, but I’m too much of an insecure mess to be alone_. That plus a solid ten minutes of blowjob jokes will get you a decent set. The women in the crowd love it. 

You’re a different person on stage, but everyone is. Half the comics you know can project confidence and ease behind a microphone and nowhere else. You’ve heard guys tell the most disgusting, raunchy stories who couldn’t stutter through a sentence when they spoke to you to your face. You refuse to feel guilty about it. 

“It was written _by_ a twenty-five-year-old,” Sarah says, “and I’m sure it was based on personal experience, but isn’t that your persona anyway? What’s the female equivalent of Peter Pan syndrome?” 

“Tinkerbell,” you say. “If everybody doesn’t clap for me I’ll die.” 

You tell yourself sometimes, you could always come out if you wanted to. It’s not like this is some pre-Ellen DeGeneres and Wanda Sykes era, there are other comics who do just fine. But you started out when it felt too risky to say and now, you tell yourself, it doesn’t fit your image, it wouldn’t make sense for your character. 

It scares you, is the truth, it still does. If people looked at you and saw the full, unvarnished truth, you think, it would pull something tender and hidden out from under your skin, expose it to the light for everyone to see, and you don’t want that. You can’t stand the idea of that. 

“I can always look into getting you more acting roles, if you want,” Sarah says gently. “You wouldn’t have to be on tour all the time. It might be a nice change.” 

Maybe she’s right, maybe you have enough clout built up at this point to get decent roles, but on the other hand you’re a woman in entertainment who’s almost forty, and you’d rather not find out if that makes you totally irrelevant. Better your career be playing a character you created yourself than one invented for you by somebody else. 

“It’s fine,” you say, “I’ll go over the scripts with the writers again tomorrow, we’ll make it work.” 

Later that night, alone, you pace around your kitchen in socks and pajamas, wearing your thickest and most unattractive pair of glasses, and you recite the lines until your voice sounds like your own again, until you can almost believe it. 

_2016_

You were about to go onstage when you got the phone call from Mike, and you hung up on him mid-sentence, which you would probably be sorry about later but in a moment you didn’t care. You threw up over the balcony railing and Sarah said “Jesus Christ” and pressed a glass of bourbon into your hand, and you could feel yourself start to sweat off your makeup already before you even walked out under the stage lights and started that joke you’d done a hundred times before, “So I caught my boyfriend masturbating so my friends’ pictures on Facebook —“ and you were sure your lipstick was smudged all across your face. 

And you couldn’t finish because all you were hearing was a roar in your ears of every name you’d ever been called in middle school, all layered on to of _shut the fuck up, don’t fucking touch me_ in a familiar high-pitched voice. 

You didn’t want to go back, to get on that flight to Maine, but you did it anyway. 

You saw Ben and Beverly first — Ben has grown up to be handsome in a sort of generic way and Beverly was beautiful, like you’d always known she would be, untouchably so. You throw your arms around both of them anyway, and something swells in your chest you haven’t felt in a long time, 

“Beverly,” you say, “I know you design the clothes, but you really oughta be a model,” and she laughs and says you’re the one whose face is always on TV. 

But it’s not Beverly you’ve been waiting to see, not really. You know that as soon as you walk into the dining room and you see her, standing awkwardly with her hands at her sides, and that’s _her_ , the first girl you loved, and you can’t believe you forgot. 

“Hey there,” she says, waving a hand a little awkwardly. 

She looks — well, she doesn’t look the same, but you would know her anywhere. You think if she had passed you on the street you _would_ have known her, no matter how deeply the forgetting seems to be. Same eyes, same dark brown perfect eyes, same nose, same arch in her eyebrows. She’s got her hair cut short, almost a man’s cut except for the little flourishes around the ears and the forehead clearly intended to make it look more feminine. She’s wearing khakis and a button-up blouse, nothing to distinguish her from a woman you would meet at a Starbucks and not think twice about, except for her nervous smile, except for the fact that you knew her, once, better than anyone. Your mouth goes dry looking at her; your feet feel stuck to the floor. 

You wonder if you look different to her, if you look recognizable. You didn’t dress up for this occasion, though you now wish you had put at least a little more thought into it. For some reason you didn’t think about it for a moment when you dressed for this dinner — button-up shirt and jeans, hair pulled back in a untidy little ponytail, even your thick-framed glasses instead of your contacts. You probably don’t look much different now than you did as a teenager, and an odd shiver of dread runs through you at the thought. 

Then your eyes fall on her wedding ring. Time has passed for her, then, even if it suddenly seems like it’s stood still for you. 

You sit next to each other at dinner — there’s a chair open between you, there are seven chairs and only six of you, but the two of you are leaning in, angling your bodies toward each other. She tells you that she has a job in insurance, risk analysis, the description that follows so boring you pretend to fall asleep and she scowls, snaps at Beverly for laughing at the joke. She tells you she’s lived in New York for years, has a nice place there, with her husband. 

It shouldn’t surprise you. It shouldn’t sting, but it does. 

“Did you change your last name?” you ask her, suddenly feeling a horrible sadness at the idea. It would be awful if she were a Smith or a Jones or anything else, really, you always liked Kaspbrak — crisp and sharp-edged, the way she was. Kaspbrak and Tozier, two names no one could ever spell right on the first try. 

“No, I didn’t,” she says. “I already had a professional reputation when I got married.” She says it defensively, like people have challenged her on it, but you want to sigh with relief. 

_Good old Dr. K_., you used to call her, when she’d patch up the bumps and scrapes of the rest of the group with her first aid kit she always carried with her, and you can see her now, twelve or thirteen staring down at you with her hands on her hips, her hair held back with little barrettes, lecturing you about how it wasn’t safe to rollerskate on uneven sidewalks. How did you forget all of that? 

The waitress brings out all your plates of food, and you look with dismay at her order of plain rice and steamed vegetables. 

“What, are you trying to lose weight?” you ask, leaning over to pinch her skinny wrist. “I don’t think you really need to worry about that. Please don’t tell me you’re one of those people who only eats low-fat microwave popcorn for lunch every day.” 

“What? I don’t do that. How would that even be an effective diet?” She scowls, snatching her hand back. “I’m just trying to stay healthy, that’s all. And I have a lot of allergies.” 

“You don’t have a lot of allergies. I bet you just read stuff on WebMD and it freaks you, dude.” 

“Oh my god, do _not_ call me _dude_ ,” she says, and you think, a little nonsensically, a little drunkenly, that you really have missed her so much. 

You don’t remember the rest of it until after dinner, when you all open your fortune cookies together and the words spell out a message that tells you why you really came back here. It’s too late by then. You should leave, you should never have come here at all, you’ll all going to die if you stay. You wish you didn’t remember. 

—

Everyone’s flipping their shit later that night at the townhouse, talking about prophetic visions and twenty-seven year cycles, and you can’t take another fucking minute of it. She can’t either, apparently, outside pacing around and barking something into her cellphone, and you follow after she with the pretense of a cigarette. 

You realize as soon as you step outside that it’s only her posture and her facial expression that are agitated; her voice is totally different, talking like she’s trying to calm someone down, faux-soothing. 

“No, it’s alright, really, Marty,” she says, voice almost wheedling. “I’m with my friends and I promise I’m going to be okay, it’s just a little weekend trip. I’ll be home before you know it. I have my medication, please, don’t worry.” 

If you didn’t know her it would sound like she’s talking to a child, but you do know better and you know this is closer to the way she talked when she _was_ a child, placating and nervous. It makes you a little sick to your stomach, especially when she ends the class by saying “I love you,” in that fake gentle tone. 

She shrugs a little bit when she meets your eyes, almost like she’s apologizing for your having heard it.

It doesn’t sit right in your head, any of it. You’ve been picturing her in some New York skyscraper office with glass walls, breaking the glass ceiling, a real business bitch in heels and a power suit. Maybe she is, but it’s tough to reconcile that with her voice on the phone, which in person you’re sure is accompanied by batting eyelashes. 

It’s tough to reconcile either of them with the girl you used to know, the girl you were in love with, the girl who loved running and jumping and screaming at you at the top of her voice, who was brimming with righteous rage. 

You think that maybe you shouldn’t be seeing her again, now. It’s not the right order of things. You should’ve remembered her, the way she was when you were kids, should’ve let that love fade away the way it was supposed to and then never seen her again. It shouldn’t be like this, that old feeling of wanting her and wanting to protect her all mixed in with this strange unfair disappointment. Of course she didn’t grow up the way you imagined she would. Surely she feels the same way about you, if she’s seen you on TV, telling one of your sparkling anecdotes about your fictional boyfriend’s inability to buy tampons. No one who knew you at thirteen should have to know you now. 

You whistle, long and low, like you’re impressed. “Wow,” you say. “Most girls settle for marrying their dads, but you did one better. You married your mom.” 

She turns to practically snarl at you, her teeth bared angrily. “Oh, fuck you,” she says. “Lemme see a picture of your boyfriend, huh, from your standup. I bet I know exactly what he fuckin’ looks like — short guy with a patchy beard wearing hipster glasses, right? That’s what you make him sound like.” She sounds furious about it. 

“Come on,” you say, already exhausted by the pretense, “you know there’s no boyfriend. I’m not writing it, remember?” 

She must know, you’re thinking; she used to know you better than anyone and so on some level she must. 

“Well, the point is you don’t know him,” she says. “You don’t know anything about my marriage.” 

Self-righteous as ever. You almost love her for it. 

It stings you that you’re a little disappointed in her, too, as if you expected her to someone do better than you did, out there on her own all those years. It’s clear that none of the seven of you did. 

“I’m gonna leave in the morning,” you tell her. “You too?” 

“Yeah,” she says. “Fuck this town.” 

—

You see the werewolf again. It’s waiting for you, when you leave the arcade with your stupid little Street Fighter token clutched in your sweaty hand. It feels like it’s always been waiting. 

It feels like It’s reusing the same punchline to an old joke. You don’t need to have aced freshman year English to get the symbolism — the ordinary woman driven mad by the full moon, her teeth covered in blood, her clothing in scraps. Animalistic, underneath it all, insatiably hunger. The thing looked just like Karen in _The Howling_ , those tacky special effects that scared you worse than anything as a kid. 

Its words are still echoing in your head long moments after you turn and run, _should I tell them your dirty little secret_? It’s obvious — Karen, on live TV, transformed into a monster. You’re castigating yourself for falling for it even as your breath is coming in ragged, your hands shaking. It’s not real. It’s not real, it’s not real, you have to leave. You have to leave before it becomes real enough to really hurt you. 

You’re back at the Townhouse, throwing things into your suitcase recklessly, when Beverly walks into your room without knocking. It’s obvious what you’re doing, the few crumpled items of clothing you unpacked strewn around on the bed, but you still snap to attention when she walks in like you’re going to be able to hide something. 

“You’re going to leave,” Bev says flatly. 

You knew her the shortest time out of anyone, just one short summer before she moved away. The two of you used to smoke cigarettes together, sneakily, where no one would find you and start rattling off statistics about lung cancer. It wasn’t exactly a solid foundation for a friendship, but it still feels more real than more of the relationships you’ve had as an adult. You liked Bev so instantly, with her wry thirteen-year-old cynicism. You might’ve fallen a little bit in love with her, if there was any of your heart left to spare. 

“Yeah,” you say. “I have to get the fuck out. Sorry, wish you all the best, but this place is making me crazy and I’m not gonna hang around to get killed.” 

“I think this place is reminding us of who we used to be,” Beverly says. 

She almost says it like it’s a good thing, and you don’t know what she can possibly mean by that. 

“You all made everything so much better that summer,” Bev says. “It was short, but it was everything to me. You were the first real friends I ever had. And none of you expected anything from me. None of you wanted me to be some perfect china doll.” 

You smile, weakly. “You were always the toughest girl I knew, Marsh.” 

“We were both tough.” Her eyes go a little distant, like she’s looking through you. “Don’t you hate it?” 

“What?” 

“Being famous,” she says simply. Beverly says it with contempt, like it’s something unfortunate that has happened to her, and you want to say it’s not like that for you, that it’s exactly like how you imagined it, but you can’t make yourself lie to her. “Being watched all the time. Everyone always looking and judging and evaluating you. Knowing if you leave the house in sweatpants it’ll be in some fucking magazine.” 

You leave the house in sweatpants anyway, and your publicist doesn’t send you the photos, but you don’t think you’ve ever seen a photo of Bev where she wasn’t perfectly put together. 

It was always like that, with Beverly — you never quite know how to talk to her. The other girls at school didn’t think much of either of you, but it was for different reasons. You thought in a way they were always jealous of Bev; she wasn’t from the nice part of town, she didn’t try as hard as they did, and yet she was beautiful in a way that seemed almost too grown-up, like she already understood things the rest of you were too young to know. 

No one was jealous of you. You were the girl who didn’t grow up, couldn’t do any of it right, couldn’t pretend, here in Derry, to be anything other than what you were. 

“Wishing you could stop being yourself,” she says, “and just be —“ 

“A person,” you finish. “Like we were when you were kids.” 

She smiles sadly. “Feels like we never really grew up, doesn’t it? We couldn’t do it right, not without our memories.” 

“I don’t know,” you say; you didn’t mean to get drawn into this, but you are now. You’re thinking about how genuinely sad she looks. “This is gonna sound ironic from me, but I think I maybe grew up too much. Could’ve used some of those lighthearted childhood memories.” 

“Lighthearted, huh?”

“Sure. The stuff before the clown.” You offer her a smile; you feel like your skin might start erupting into fur and fangs at any moment. _Don’t let her see._

“Look,” she says, “I’m tired of being pushed around. I’m tired of being whatever people want me to be. This place wants to tell us that we’re scared little girls who can’t fight back, but we don’t have to be. We can win this time.” 

“Sure,” you say. “You’re right, we can do that.” You try to put on a convinced brave face. 

You can’t do that. Forget about being a scared little girl, you’re scared right here and now. You know yourself and you know this: even if you tried to fight It, the second it had the opportunity to peel back your mask, show everybody the snarling animal you really are, you’d run. 

“I’ll stay,” you tell her, not meaning it for a second.

—

You can’t do it, though. You can’t go through with just leaving. You remember that; Stan reminds you, even though he’s not here, that these are the only real friends you’ve ever had. The only person you’ve ever really, genuinely loved. You couldn’t forgive yourself if anything happened to them, but especially not to her. 

When you see her again, there’s a stab wound through her cheek, and you’ve just thrown an axe into a man’s head. 

She’s staring at you with these wide, horrified eyes — they all are, her and Ben and Beverly. Mike is still clutching at the wound on his arm, looking dazed, and your mind is oddly calm when you look at him. _He would have died if I hadn’t done that,_ you think. _He would have died and instead the only person who’s dead is Henry fuckin’ Bowers. Hey, isn’t that a sweet deal?_ A giggle bubbles up in your throat. Your mouth tastes like vomit and you wipe it on your sleeve. 

“Uh,” you say. “Sorry.” 

She’s crossing the room to you, and you notice the bandage on her cheek for the first time. “Hey,” you say, pushing yourself up onto your elbows, “hey, what happened to you? Are you alright?” 

“We should call the police,” Ben is saying. Mike is saying something back about absolutely not calling the police. You don’t hear him, really. You reach out and almost touch the bandage, but think better of it and pull back your hand. 

“I’m okay,” she says firmly. “Bowers got to me first.” 

An overwhelming wave of guilt washes over you the moment she says it. You left — you almost left her here to get eaten alive by this town. What the fuck were you thinking? What is wrong with you that you would do that? 

“It’s okay,” she says again. She must be able to see it, the guilt. “I stabbed him back. Pulled the knife out of my face. You probably barely needed to do the thing with the axe. It’s like when you’re trying to open a jar and you just need somebody else to do the last twist.” She illustrates that by doing the twist in the air with her hands. She doesn’t seem to be freaking out at all, even though she pressed her hands to her mouth in horror when she walked in. 

You never thought of yourself as somebody who could kill. When, in your life before this, would you have needed to? You carried pepper spray most of the time, on a keychain. That’s a proportionate reaction to a rational fear. Nothing about this is rational. Bowers’ body is still on the floor next to you. His eyes are open. 

Bowers hated you all, you remember that, and you hated him too. He was the first boy you hated, with violent, bitter ferocity, crying into your hands, a lost little kid on a park bench. You hated a lot of other men after that, almost as much, but he was the first. 

He would’ve killed Mike, you remind yourself. He would have killed _her_ , if she weren’t so fucking brave. So fucking strong.

“You pulled the knife out of your face?” you say, dazed. 

“Yeah,” she says. 

“Wow. Like _Psycho_ but in reverse.” 

She smiles — not a really sincere smile, not one that seems real, but it’s a little reassuring all the same. Stupid, trying to leave without her, you think. You won’t make that mistake again. 

—

Underneath Neibolt, she’s panicking, her shoulders shaking, saying, “I can’t do this. I’m going to get us all killed.” 

She’s reaching for her inhaler, her breath coming in desperate gulps of air, and you know it’s not real — she never had asthma, all placebos — but it still cuts through you, the way it did to see the twisted spider-legged version of Stan. Not real, but still powerful. 

You want to comfort her, to put your arm around her and tell her everything’s going to be alright, but that won’t work. That’s not what she needs. Instead, you wrestle the inhaler out of her hand — “Hey, what the _fuck_?” she says indignantly — and hold it out of her reach. She’s still short enough that you can do that; it made her furious when you were kids, but she doesn’t submit to the indignity of jumping for it or trying to twist your arm now. 

“I should just go,” she says, and she sounds furious, with you or with herself. 

“Mike said we can’t do it unless we’re all together.” 

“Yeah, well, Stan’s not here, is he? Maybe he should be and I shouldn’t.” She laughs, an edge of hysteria to it. “I can’t fucking be here, okay? I’m not strong like you or Beverly or the guys. I just, all I do is fuck up, and get myself hurt, and I should’ve listened and never left—“ 

“Hey.” You put a hand on your shoulder, look directly into her eyes. “Look, I don’t know who’s talking right now, if that’s your mom or your husband or what—“ She flinches at that, but you keep talking. “But it’s not you, okay? I know it’s not you. Who stabbed Bowers with a knife she pulled out of her own face?” 

She looks down at her shoes. “Me.” 

“Who killed a clown before she was fourteen?” 

Her voice is a little more certain the second time. “Me.” 

“Right. I remember you in high school, you know? You weren’t afraid of your mom. You weren’t afraid of shit.” You’re seeing her in your memories, running, faster than you could ever keep up with, with her ponytail streaming out behind you and then with her hair cut short — streamlined, she said, unstoppable. It makes you smile to think that she never grew it out. “You can do this, okay? You’re not fucking delicate. I’m sorry anybody made you think you are, but that’s not gonna fucking fly while I’m around, dude.” 

“ _Dude_ ,” she scoffs. “I hate that.” She squares her shoulders and holds out her hand. “Okay, I got it. Thank you. Now give me back my token. Let’s go kill this fucking clown.” 

—

And then, when it’s over, you walk out into the sunlight again. 

“I can’t go in the water,” she says. “Do you even know how many fucking bacteria there are in standing water like that? I have an _open wound_ , okay, does everyone remember that I got fucking stabbed, do you want me to have necrotic tissue on my _face_?” 

“After all that you’re still afraid of a little bacteria?” you tease, and she scowls. 

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure bacteria doesn’t obey that same bullshit rules as the clown, so me not being scared of it is not going to stop me from getting infected,” she says, but she takes a step further into the water. You grin. 

“Come on,” you say pleadingly, “just don’t dunk your head underwater,” and when you doggy-paddle further out, she follows you. 

You feel, suddenly, very aware of your own body, but not in a bad way. You feel your blood moving under your skin, your legs that are strong enough to keep your head above the water, that got you out when Neibolt was collapsing around you. 

Everything feels different, now that it’s over. Derry feels different, and you think maybe this place wasn’t something to run away from, not completely. Maybe this is where you were most yourself, swimming in the quarry with your friends, not old enough yet to care whether anyone was watching you. You weren’t watching yourself, back then, waiting for yourself to make a wrong move. 

You’re not supposed to go back to your childhood, not supposed to want to, but this is the place, and these are the people, and there’s your best friend laughing and making exaggerated faces of disgust, and you’re alive. You’re really alive. 

“Hey.” You turn to her as she ducks out of the way of a splash of water; Beverly and Ben have gotten into some kind of cutesy, playful splash fight. “Hey, you saved my life back there, you know?” You wish you’d been conscious, been able to see her throw the spear down that thing’s throat like some kind of miniature Amazon warrior. 

She grins. She looks like as much of a wreck as you must. There’s blood seeping through her bandage, and her hair is wet and disheveled now, her clothes and face streaked with mud. She looks happy in spite of it, and you wonder if she’s feeling the same sensation of power, of presence, as you are. Your eyes meet and you think maybe she is. “Yeah,” she says. “You’re welcome. Come over here, you have grime all over your fucking glasses.” 

You raise a hand to take them off but she gets there first, gently lifted them off your face. You’re grateful to be nearsighted then, too, so that you can still see her and it’s only the background that fades away. 

“What are you gonna do, clean those off in the dirty water?” you say, but she kisses you instead. 

Your glasses are lost in the water and you all have to go diving to look for them, but it hardly matters. She’s close enough that you can see her, anyway. 

—

“I talked to my husband,” she tells you the next day. 

You notice it, the phrasing, the distancing. You would try not to read into it except that Bev’s doing it too, saying “my husband” instead of the name. And she’s been talking to Bev, the two of them huddled in corners together. It would almost make you jealous that you’re not the person she’s talking to, except you know this isn’t a thing you can understand, really. You want to, though, if she trusts you enough to tell you. 

“How’d that go?” you ask. You’re standing together on the front steps of the Townhouse, an oddly public place, her leaning gracefully against the stair rail and you smoking your cigarette. She made a face at it, when she walked out here, and said something about about tobacco staining your teeth. 

“It wasn’t that bad,” she says. “He’s not, you know. He’s not as bad as Bev’s husband is. It’s really not even in the same category.” 

“He doesn’t have to be as bad as anything,” you say, not knowing how to phrase what you mean. What you mean is that she’s allowed to be selfish, that she’s allowed to leave for no good reason, but you don’t want to push. You’re so afraid of doing that. 

“He wanted to talk it out,” she says. “Come to some sort of compromise. But what kind of compromise is there if he wants me to stay and I want to go?” 

She doesn’t seem to need an answer from you, but you say it anyway: “You can go.” You think: _come with me_. You think you could run away triumphantly into the sunset like two pop stars at the end of a girl-power music video. Like you always wanted to, when you lived in this town and wanted out so badly. You watch her examine the wedding ring on her finger. It’s not big or ostentatious; it’s tasteful, really. It might be a princess cut, although you’re not totally sure what that is. 

“I always hated this thing,” she says, twisting it around her finger a little. “When we got engaged he’d always be reminding me, watch out for your ring, be carefully, and I’d get so paranoid about it. I read about these women whose hands would get — degloved, they call it, when the ring gets caught and the skin gets —“ She pulls a face and makes a sort of ripping motion in midair. 

“Jeez, okay,” you say. “I get it.” 

“But I was afraid of taking it off, too, because I thought I’d lose it,” she says. She’s looking at you urgently, like she’s trying to convey more than just the substance of her words. “I told him I didn’t want a diamond, but he got me one anyway. I don’t know why I said yes to that, I never have trouble saying no to anyone else. He just has a way of making me think that I’m — delicate.” 

“But you’re not,” you say. You reach out to her, squeezing her shoulder for a moment. A just-friends touch, even though you’ve already kissed her. “Tough as diamonds. And just as capable of ripping off skin.” 

She flashes you a rueful smile, ducking her head. 

“Anyway, maybe I’ll throw it into the ocean like in Titanic,” she says. 

“You wanna drive out to the coast?” 

She blinks. “Oh. I mean, I meant like in California.” 

You stare at her for a moment, not knowing what to say, the weight of the words heavy in the air between the two of you. “If you wanted me to come,” she says hastily. “I just, I’m not exactly psyched to go back to New York. I thought maybe you’d want me to stay with you for a little while.” 

She looks anxious, a little, her mouth set in a hard stern line, and you smile, your heart feeling light in your chest. You feel suddenly certain about this in a way you haven’t feel about anything in ages. You’re going to be there when she needs you, from now on, and you know she’ll do the same for you. That’s your right, both of you, for all the years you were apart. You earned that. You’ll learn again how to be the person you were back when you were together. That’s not gone before, an inevitable consequence of growing up. She’s already giving it back to you. 

“I’d like that,” you say quietly, but there’s almost no need to answer out loud at all, because she’s smiling back at you now. You reach out and she takes you hand, twining your fingers together. 

—

“What’re you gonna wear to the awards thing?” she says, in the process of carefully sterilizing a pair of scissors in your spacious bathroom back in LA. 

Objectively, you’re aware that the whole arc of your relationship is a really severe U-Haul cliche, one so laughably obvious that you’re not even sure how you’re going to work it into your new routine. _Yeah, my girlfriend and I moved in together after like, three days. She filed for divorce a week later. We’re like a parody of lesbians._

It’s good, though. It’s really good, and obviously that’s why people do it, because sometimes you find someone and it feels like a waste of time whenever you’re apart, sometimes whenever you’re not touching. Which is kind of intense and not very funny, but maybe you can just leave out that particular joke. 

“I don’t know,” you say. “I’m thinking maybe a suit?” 

She looks thoughtful. “You don’t have to wear a suit, you know,” she says. “Like, it’s not a requirement.” 

You roll your eyes. “I know that,” you say, but the truth is that it does feel significant, to do that at your first public appearance since coming out on Twitter. It’s not really the suit, you would show up to awards shows in sweatpants if you thought you could get away with it, it’s the message. Like making some kind of statement that you’re not compromising anymore, and people will just have to get used to it. “It’s what I want to wear. I have to sexually appeal to a whole new demographic now.” 

“Well,” she says, and you think you can see the tips of her ears flushing a little, “I think it’ll look good.” 

“Plus it’ll go with the haircut, if you ever finish cleaning those things.” 

“You sure you want me to do this?” she says doubtfully, clicking her scissors. “I’m not exactly a professional, you know, you could go to a salon.” 

“No,” you insist, “I want you to do it. It’s my reward for all the times I cut your hair in high school.” 

She cuts her own hair now, has kept it short and precise since she first moved out here. You love it, the way you love the suits she wears to work and her weekend t-shirts and her ability to change the oil in your car, because she loves those things, but also because it’s just really cute. 

“That’s because I couldn’t get anyone else to do it!” 

You smirk at her. “Oh, was that the only reason?”

She rolls her eyes. “What, were you reading my diary or something?” 

She cuts your hair over the bathroom sink, simple and efficient chops of her scissors, and then sets the clippers to your requested setting, which she checks and double-checks with you multiple times. She’s careful about it, but not hesitant, you think, like you used to be when you cut her hair. She’s more practiced, more sure, but she’s just as careful as you always were, like you’re just as precious. 

“Don’t look at it yet,” she says, and you grin with your eyes still closed. “I have to make sure it’s good.” She takes your chin in her hand and twists your head gently back and forth, and you’re happy to be led. Your smile is probably splitting your face in two. 

“It looks good,” she pronounces after a through inspection. “You really, uh, you really have the jawline for it.” 

You laugh, darting forward to kiss her. “So do you, babe,” you say. “A couple of perfect jawlines.” 

In the mirror, when she decides you’re allowed to look, you have to admit: it actually does make your face look pretty decent. It goes well with your glasses, you think, and you’ve stopped wearing contacts most of the time; it looks more like the person you are in your head, less like someone you’re trying to be. And the two of you standing next to each other, you look like you fit. Like a matching set. You wrap your arm around her waist, beaming. “I don’t know what you were so worried about it. It looks great.” 

“You think so?” 

“Yeah,” you say, still looking at your reflections. “It feels better. Lighter. I love it.” 


End file.
